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Chief Senate Counsel representing the United States Army and partner at Hale and Dorr, Joseph Welch (left), with United States Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin (right), at the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations' McCarthy-Army hearings, June 9, 1954. (Photo: Public Domain)
I learned to peer beyond my political bubble in the early 1980s, first when Ronald Reagan was elected president and destroyed the New Deal coalition in which I was raised and then when Phyllis Schlafly's Stop ERA women indeed stopped the Equal Rights Amendment for women from becoming the law of the land by defeating those of us fighting to win its passage in the Illinois legislature. We needed one more state for the Constitutional Amendment to be enacted, and Illinois was one of three where we had a chance. On the steps of the Springfield, Illinois, capital were white women with lacquered hair wearing skirt suits and beige stockings carrying red Stop ERA signs. They seemed to have stepped out of the past, so how could they stop the forward march of history?
Well, they did. I found out later many were part of a resurging right-wing Christian movement. And I learned the hard way that you have to understand who your political opponents are and not take them for granted in your own righteousness. I ended up researching a doctoral dissertation about right-wing and liberal women in conflict over fundamental questions about U.S. life and governance during the conspiratorial red-baiting era after World War II and during McCarthyism in the 1950s.
McCarthyism took place during the Korean War when Democrat Harry Truman was president. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy's fellow Republicans were happy to go along with his outrageous, made-up stories about subversives in the State Department or wherever to try to capture the power that they lost during the major political realignment of the New Deal in the 1930s--particularly the right-wing, isolationist Republicans led by Robert Taft who wanted to dismantle Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act and Keynesian management of the economy. The moderate Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower who generally accepted the New Deal and were relatively liberal on race may have won the presidency in 1954 within this cauldron, but they lost the party in the long run, as we have seen.
Here are eight lessons this history taught me in my struggle to understand my country now.
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I learned to peer beyond my political bubble in the early 1980s, first when Ronald Reagan was elected president and destroyed the New Deal coalition in which I was raised and then when Phyllis Schlafly's Stop ERA women indeed stopped the Equal Rights Amendment for women from becoming the law of the land by defeating those of us fighting to win its passage in the Illinois legislature. We needed one more state for the Constitutional Amendment to be enacted, and Illinois was one of three where we had a chance. On the steps of the Springfield, Illinois, capital were white women with lacquered hair wearing skirt suits and beige stockings carrying red Stop ERA signs. They seemed to have stepped out of the past, so how could they stop the forward march of history?
Well, they did. I found out later many were part of a resurging right-wing Christian movement. And I learned the hard way that you have to understand who your political opponents are and not take them for granted in your own righteousness. I ended up researching a doctoral dissertation about right-wing and liberal women in conflict over fundamental questions about U.S. life and governance during the conspiratorial red-baiting era after World War II and during McCarthyism in the 1950s.
McCarthyism took place during the Korean War when Democrat Harry Truman was president. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy's fellow Republicans were happy to go along with his outrageous, made-up stories about subversives in the State Department or wherever to try to capture the power that they lost during the major political realignment of the New Deal in the 1930s--particularly the right-wing, isolationist Republicans led by Robert Taft who wanted to dismantle Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act and Keynesian management of the economy. The moderate Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower who generally accepted the New Deal and were relatively liberal on race may have won the presidency in 1954 within this cauldron, but they lost the party in the long run, as we have seen.
Here are eight lessons this history taught me in my struggle to understand my country now.
I learned to peer beyond my political bubble in the early 1980s, first when Ronald Reagan was elected president and destroyed the New Deal coalition in which I was raised and then when Phyllis Schlafly's Stop ERA women indeed stopped the Equal Rights Amendment for women from becoming the law of the land by defeating those of us fighting to win its passage in the Illinois legislature. We needed one more state for the Constitutional Amendment to be enacted, and Illinois was one of three where we had a chance. On the steps of the Springfield, Illinois, capital were white women with lacquered hair wearing skirt suits and beige stockings carrying red Stop ERA signs. They seemed to have stepped out of the past, so how could they stop the forward march of history?
Well, they did. I found out later many were part of a resurging right-wing Christian movement. And I learned the hard way that you have to understand who your political opponents are and not take them for granted in your own righteousness. I ended up researching a doctoral dissertation about right-wing and liberal women in conflict over fundamental questions about U.S. life and governance during the conspiratorial red-baiting era after World War II and during McCarthyism in the 1950s.
McCarthyism took place during the Korean War when Democrat Harry Truman was president. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy's fellow Republicans were happy to go along with his outrageous, made-up stories about subversives in the State Department or wherever to try to capture the power that they lost during the major political realignment of the New Deal in the 1930s--particularly the right-wing, isolationist Republicans led by Robert Taft who wanted to dismantle Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act and Keynesian management of the economy. The moderate Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower who generally accepted the New Deal and were relatively liberal on race may have won the presidency in 1954 within this cauldron, but they lost the party in the long run, as we have seen.
Here are eight lessons this history taught me in my struggle to understand my country now.